There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

If there is a discomfort that registers, perhaps it is in the realization that, once again, there is a lock that our enemies cannot pick. There is a code that they cannot decipher, no matter their desire to. No matter how many times they have fallen into dreams of our language, our enemies wake up with the same tongues, reaching but falling short. What else to do, then, but to imagine every gesture toward flyness as an affront to their own monochromatic living?

LeBron’s face was as bare as my own when I first heard his name. It is impossible to believe that any of us ever looked like children.

Lord, I have lived long enough to look like my father, though I might fight it.